Milos Forman's long-awaited Goya's Ghosts may seem to be another respectable entry in the director's late-career procession of biopics, following his takes on Mozart, Larry Flynt, Andy Kaufman, et al. But its tonal shifts, bizarre narrative and parable-like structure suggest more of a kinship with Forman's early Czech films. Fascinating and frustrating, it might also be the most personal film he's made in decades.
Stellan Skarsgard brings his patented low-key bewilderment to the part of legendary Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. Forman and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere aren't afraid to depict Goya as a passive protagonist. When his muse Inés (Natalie Portman), the daughter of a wealthy noble patron, is whisked away by the Spanish Inquisition and tortured, Goya feels helpless. What he doesn't quite realize is that another patron, the powerful monk Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem), is also taken with Inés. We never truly understand if Lorenzo has the power to free Inés, but he does seduce her.
Forman has called Lorenzo a composite of other historical figures, which may account for the fact that we can never quite pin the monk's motives down. He's a perceptive individual — he mounts an informed defense of Goya's work to his superiors in the film's opening scene — but he's also, ultimately, a coward and an opportunist. Said opportunism reasserts itself when he flees Spain and then, in the film's second half, returns with Napoleon's army. Just as idealistic an atheistic revolutionary as he was a monk, Lorenzo makes a compelling (though ludicrous) stand-in for the ideological seesaw of history. If Forman were to make a modern-day sequel, Lorenzo would probably be one of those '60s campus revolutionaries who grew up to be neocon ideologues.
But the film doesn't really concern itself with what Lorenzo's position is. It's more about what Goya's position isn't. The artist's eye allows him to reproduce the horrors of the world around him, even as he becomes deaf (literally) to the historical realities he's experiencing. And one can understand why: after all, this is a filmmaker who lived through the horrors of Nazism (he lost both parents in Auschwitz), the ravages of Communist rule and the turmoil of the '60s. "What are an artist's responsibilities to history?" Forman seems to be asking. He never quite finds his answer, but he does leave us with what must be one of the most startling final images in recent cinema history: oppressor and victim, bound inextricably for life, drifting away from the artist's gaze. However it's depicted, history marches on, absurd, paradoxical and relentless. — Bilge Ebiri